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Catalina Lobo-Guerrero is a freelance journalist and anthropologist currently living in Barcelona, Spain. For the past decade she has been working as an investigative journalist and correspondent in Bogotá, Colombia and Caracas, Venezuela where has written about politics, corruption, the armed conflict and violence. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Guardian, El País and other smaller and independent media outlets in Latin America.
The Real Watchdog Of The World's Biggest Platforms
This is the story of the man behind some of the most important political stories today: Jonathan Albright. He knew about Cambridge Analytica and how the Russian trolls had reached millions more on Facebook than the company initially acknowledged. While everyone was focusing on the ads, he started investigating phoney Facebook pages which promoted content. He also discovered that the Russian trolls had not only worked through Facebook but also through Instagram.
Wired describes him as a "sort of detective of digital misdeeds" who spends most nights and weekends crunching data, finding patterns and discovering how politics has become enmeshed in social media. Albright is now the research director at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The title sounds fancy but he's just a 40-year-old guy who sits in a dark basement office with a leaky pipe.
Albright knows the monster from the inside. After having worked for both Yahoo and Google, he can navigate the ecosystem and understands how information is being manipulated, and the ways it filters through the public mainstream. For years no one cared about what he did (how hashtags would transform communities for better and worse, for example) because many people don't actually understand – or care about – how algorithms, news and social media work.
That seems to have changed after Donald Trump's victory. Albright was as surprised as many and decided to start reviewing links to sites that had spread fake news throughout the campaign. He identified patterns, links, and mapped out what had been the misinformation ecosystem. It wasn't only Facebook and Twitter – Youtube, Amazon, Pinterest, and even the New York Times had been infiltrated by fake news. Since then, he hasn't stopped digging deeper and sharing his insights and findings with reporters from the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Buzzfeed, amongst others, to expose both the power and vulnerabilities of today's tech and social media giants.
